Faith writer Jonathan Merritt is the Paul Ryan of homophobes – an ambitious, not very bright self-promoter who has cottoned on to the media's desperation for "balance" and has made a handsome career out of it. When some Christian fanatic rails that gay people should be thrown in jail or penned behind electric fences, you can count on the tsk-tsking Merritt to serve as the polite face of bigotry. Just because gay people face eternal damnation doesn't mean we all can't get along!

So in the midst of the debate surrounding the bigotry of the Chick-fil-A president, he must have seemed like a godsend to the Atlantic's editors, who published his op-ed defending the good old American way of non-ideological fast-food consumption. When it comes to gay rights, the evangelical boy wonder intoned, "we must learn to have level-headed disagreements". Self-styled moderates everywhere nodded sagely.

Thing is, Merritt has a taste for both fried chicken and other young men. A few days after his Atlantic piece ran, an undergraduate ex-evangelical blogged that he and Merritt recently spent the night together. They engaged in sexting and a couple of steamy Skype sessions, according to the blogger, but the real action went down in a Chicago parking lot, fuelled by grocery-store Riesling swigged straight from the bottle. Merritt admits that the two had "physical contact that went beyond the bounds of friendship". The younger man doesn't give much more detail, though he does mention that "by the end of the night my lips were raw and chapped from his unshaven face".

Career destroyed? Not sufficiently. Merritt has made his own gay leanings, and his struggle to conquer them, into yet more fodder for the booming evangelical industry. And as for his paramour, the poor thing sounds troubled. He writes that he's "haunted by what I've done", and that outing Merritt "overwhelms me with guilt". Well, better that than guilt at being gay, like the untold thousands of lost, anxious young men and women subjected to the spouting of Merritt and others.

If Merritt's lover is haunted and guilt-wracked, that's probably because the act of outing someone doesn't fit with our contemporary understanding of gay identity, in which coming out is no longer a moral imperative but a personal choice. Once, gay politics was a communal affair – only by working together, as out gay men and lesbians, could we achieve equality and defeat homophobia. But today, gay politics has turned distressingly isolationist. Marriage is favoured not for public equality but for private privilege, and attempts to acknowledge the homosexuality of, say, the CEO of the world's largest corporation are met by angry denunciations from otherwise tolerant people: "It's none of our business."

Outing – a political act held over from a more radical time in gay politics, a time of Act Up and die-ins – is still with us, and still bothering us. Do closeted stars who make money off of their perceived heterosexuality merit our discretion? (On the flip side, should we even care when has-been celebrities out themselves to make a comeback – a strategy employed by everyone from Mika to Miss Cleo?) What about a strait-laced politician whose party supports discriminatory policies, but who is personally silent on them? Does discussing the sexual hypocrisy of an oil company chief executive make us more attuned to his ecological sins, or less so?

I don't pretend these are easy questions. My own view is that outing often does more good than ill, and that appeals to privacy reinforce the damaging belief that gay life belongs behind closed doors. But in truth, the only fair stance towards outing is a critical ambivalence. It's no good to insist that everyone must be out and proud, nor that we all have an unchecked claim to being left alone. You need to think hard, and act when it's right. When somebody isn't just living a closeted life, but is actively profiting from homophobia, then the circumstances are much clearer. The harm of outing people in the business of gay hatred is a trifle compared to the harm of letting them go on.

Merritt himself, like many homophobes, might not even realise he's gay. Certainly his comments since his outing, in which he says he is a straight man suffering from "brokenness," suggest he might be less hypocritical than deeply confused (though I'm sorry, sweetie, but the telltale lisp, the copious hair product, the body-hugging shirts … who knew evangelicals could be this camp). But ultimately, his outing isn't really about him. It's about the discourse his career is perpetuating, and whether the harm he inflicts can be stopped if the truth about his own sex life is disclosed. The goal isn't to embarrass the homophobe, but to delegitimise the message.

Outing is an imperfect weapon. It shouldn't be used blithely. But gay people have to keep it in our arsenal, and not buy the fiction that personal privacy always trumps public good. Honesty can hurt, but it doesn't destroy lives. What destroys lives, ultimately, is intolerance, hatred, and the shame of the closet.